Article preview from Start-Up - May, 2011
In a perfect world, every critical care patient prone to seizures would be continuously monitored for brain activity. The reality, though, is that only a fraction of these patients are because of expense and medical priorities. CortiCare Inc. hopes to boost that low percentage by offering hospitals an outsourced service that remotely monitors brain activity. It will be promoted as a complete turn-key operation: patient set-up, equipment set-up and monitoring from a remote location.
Article preview from Start-Up - May, 2011
In a perfect world, every critical care patient prone to seizures would be continuously monitored for brain activity. The reality, though, is that only a fraction of these patients are monitored because of expense and medical priorities. CortiCare Inc. hopes to boost that low percentage by offering an outsourced service to hospitals that remotely monitors brain activity.
"A lot of hospitals simply cannot afford to do this type of monitoring in-house," says CortiCare's president and CEO Brad Westcott. "Not only do we want to improve the outcomes of patients by preventing memory loss, motor skill loss and even death, but we also want to avoid costly care down the road. We are able to prevent seizures that may otherwise go undetected."
A local neurologist with privileges at the contracted hospital orders the service that lasts from 24 to 72 hours. Two groups of patients in the intensive care unit can benefit: head trauma and anoxia (those who lack oxygen, including some cardiac arrest cases, lengthy surgery cases and babies who have endured a long birth). Slightly more than five million people in the US are admitted annually to an ICU, according to a 2006 study by the Society of Critical Care Medicine. "How many of these patients, though, are susceptible to seizures?" Westcott says. "By talking to various doctors, we estimate the percentage to be about 15%, which is about 760,000 patients yearly, in the US alone." This domestic market cap is approximately $1 billion.
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